He was a drunk, a misogynist, a bully and an all-around, all-time asshole — the asshole’s asshole. But someone killed that bastard Trigger Keaton, and in the final issue of The Six Sidekicks of Trigger Keaton, we finally find out who done it. But does that even matter? Wasn’t it really the door fucking we had along the way? That existential question and more are answered in Image Comics’ Six Sidekicks #6, by writer Kyle Starks, artist Chris Schweizer, coloring assistant Liz Trice Schweizer and editor Jon Moisan.
Will Nevin: Big Boss Man, we’ve reached the end of Six Sidekicks of Trigger Keaton; we’ve had a stuntman war, a fucktruck full of fisticuffs, two fucktrucks of signature Kyle Starks lines, a whodunit (more on that down below) and a whole bunch more over the course of six issues. Before we get any deeper into it, what did ya think of the series as a whole?
Zachary Jenkins: Starks and Schweizer deliver an incredibly entertaining series, albeit one that didn’t hit the emotional highs of some of their other work like Mars Attacks! In some ways, it mimicked the serialized shows it was lampooning. They are comforting because you know exactly what you are going to get with these two, and let it be known that the average Starks/Schweizer joint is a bar few comics ever reach. Six Sidekicks of Trigger Keaton was exactly the comic I expected, and it’s a comic I deeply enjoyed. I think part of me just hoped it would throw one last swerve in there for me.
Will: There was space, it seemed, for another twist — or at least you got the sense there was. And while we’ll get into this in a bit, I think you’re right in that this didn’t make you want to cry big tough man tears like Mars Attacks! (which, I mean, goddamn that had no right to do what it did) or Rock Candy Mountain. But for whatever this lacked in a knife between the emotional ribs, I think it more than made up for it in the finish.
Who’s It Gonna Be?
Will: The central idea — at least one of them, anyway — of the series is that we’d find out the sumbitch who killed that sumbitch Trigger Keaton, and sure enough, that got definitively paid off in this here issue. Not to smell my own farts, but I saw this coming by … issue #3, maybe? But I’m not unhappy with the reveal. The real murder mystery was the karate fun we had along the way.
Zack: I always saw the mystery as a formality; it was the shape the story took so these six weirdos would be compelled to be around each other again. The fact the culprit was the most obvious answer didn’t really shock me, but I’m not convinced it needed to. These characters are very dumb, that’s why they are so fun. That Richard Brannigan, the only one of the sidekicks who could reasonably be considered a normal adult human, solves the mystery after about two minutes of thinking? It feels true to the story. The sidekicks grew and changed, that’s really all I can ask for.
One Shot Left
Will: Outside of answering that central question, what did you think of how the series wrapped? I gotta say, I don’t really have many (if any?) complaints — Starks played with more characters in this one than he usually does, and I think most of them got a fair amount of page time.
Zack: Everyone gets a moment to shine here, which I see as a critical component of an ensemble cast. Partly driven by Schweizer’s expressive art and design, partly by Starks’ uncanny ability to make every character sound like a Kyle Starks character while having their own voice, they keep this boat afloat.
Will: There was just enough variety in the sidekicks, sharing that common bond of Trigger’s trauma but each receiving a specialized dose of that asshole’s ire.
One thing that separates Six Sidekicks from just about any other Starks book is the rich material he created to go along with each of the issues — fake interviews and reddit posts and IMDb profiles and all sorts of other goodies. What was your favorite?
Zack: In a previous, mistake-filled life, I was a reddit moderator for a very large comic book community. So seeing that, well, it hit hard for me. I do think the back matter in this is critical in filling out the world of Six Sidekicks. There’s something beautiful about the extra effort in creating that incidental information.
Will: I think you deleted some of my posts. Jerk. But yeah, it’s the lagniappe, those added pages, that’ll keep me coming back to this book.
Dead and Buried
Will: Now for the final question, one that’s probably the hardest: Where do you rank this among the Starks books?
Zack: Like I indicated above, I think this one misses the moon but still lands among the stars. It pulls from some of the same concepts as Assassin Nation but refines them. It’s the sign of a creator who has done this enough to understand what works. It wouldn’t be the Starks book I’d just hand to anyone — Rock Candy Mountain still holds that crown — but this was a resounding success of a story in my book. What about you, Will?
Will: In sheer absurdity/stupidity/Starks-ness, it’s hard to top Sexcastle, and that’ll probably always be my favorite — I can’t talk the Starks canon without feeling that subtle tug to go crack it open and laugh my stupid face off. At the same time, though, I can’t think of those emotional high points of Rock Candy Mountain without wanting to cry. I don’t think Six Sidekicks is necessarily less than, but it’s certainly different; while RCM and Mars Attacks! went for the emotional crotch punch, this hit a different note — something triumphal. There’s visceral pleasure in seeing the sidekicks, a crew whose personal and professional careers had been destroyed by a singular asshole, win in the end. The message there is that you can’t treat people like garbage, masculinity doesn’t require you to be a monster and sometimes — some-fucking-times — the good guys stand tall.
If it’s not the all-time Starks book, it sure is the Starks book for 2021.
Will Nevin loves bourbon and AP style and gets paid to teach one of those things. He is on Twitter far too often.
Zachary Jenkins runs ComicsXF and is a co-host on the podcast “Battle of the Atom.” Shocking everyone, he has a full and vibrant life outside of all this.
